BrandsEye Blog

In the wake of the recent US elections, and the stunning victory by Barack Obama I’ve been thinking a lot about the things he did to make his campaign a success. One of the things I personally think Mr Obama did very well was manage, with frightening efficiency, how the public spoke about him online. Knowing and responding to what people were saying about him, his policies and campaign gave him the ability to see what worked and what didn’t. It also gave him the ability to respond to attacks on his campaign quickly, efficiently and in ways that didn’t seem forced or reactionary. Now I know to run for the president of the United States, ensures that you have a massive team at your disposal, some of whom spend all their time just making sure they know what is being said about their candidate. The point is though, that having such comprehensive information about what the public think of you or your brand is actually not that difficult or costly when put into business context.

In this installment of the ’how to’ guide, I will be talking about the vast amount of information that the BrandsEye reports make available to you. In particular the Reputation Reports can, if you know how to use and interpret them, give you everything you need to help you manage and mold your reputation. In an effort to show you how to be more like Mr Obama, here are a few tips on how to get the most out of your BrandsEye Reputation Reports.

So you have your BrandsEye account up and running and you have set the ORM tool loose on the web. As BrandsEye scans the web, mentions of your brand are found and comprehensively tracked. But BrandsEye, unlike other ORM tools, does not stop with merely tracking mentions of your brand. With the addition of the BrandsEye Insight package to any existing account, you gain access to a multitude of specialised and useful reports that can help give deeper understanding of how your brand is perceived online. The first of these specialised reports is the Reputation Report. Because of its unique algorithm, BrandsEye uses the tagged data attached to mentions to generate a precise score that accurately reflects the state of your brand’s reputation. These scores are then plotted over time making it a very useful report to find out where things went right... or wrong.

To access the Reputation Report, click on the "reputation" link under "Reports" in the menu bar on the left of the BrandsEye interface.  This will take you to the Reputation Report page. The first thing you will see is something like this:

As you can see from the above screenshot, the first thing that you can do is filter mentions by what date they were published. We have asked BrandsEye to generate a report that contains mentions that were published between the 1st of September 2007 and the 30th of September 2008. This date range can be expanded or contracted as you wish, giving you the ability to look closely at your brand’s reputation at very specific points in time or more generally, as we have done. Once you have specified the time period, you can select a particular category you would like to be tracked on the graph. If we look again at the above screenshot we have chosen to track all mentions for the category "Quirk eMarketing". This will produce a graph that will illustrate the reputation of Quirk eMarketing which is generated from tracked online mentions over a yearlong period.

The Reputation Report also gives you the ability to compare the reputation of one category against another. For example, if you wanted to track your brand’s reputation in comparison to your competitors’ you are able to add another category by clicking on the ‘+’ next to the first category. The drop down boxes can be used to select a category against which you would like to compare the first. For example, in the screen shot below we have chosen to compare the reputation of Quirk eMarketing against Idea Bounty; one of our recently launched sub-brands.

Once you have decided which category’s reputation you would like to track, click on the "show" button that can be found next to the date range variables. BrandsEye will then generate a report, in the form of an animated graph, that will be displayed on your screen. It should look something like this:

There are a couple of things to note on this graph. The blue spikes spread out along the X axis represent the volume of mentions that Quirk has gained each day between the selected dates, in this case 1st September 2007 to 30th September 2008. So, for example, on the 12th of March there were 40 mentions of Quirk eMarketing online (as is pointed out by the arrow in the image). The numbers along the left of the graph represent the number of mentions found.

The second thing to point out is the line that runs across the graph. This represents Quirk’s reputation score, which has been calculated using the data tagged to each mention. The BrandsEye algorithm takes into account the source of the mention, its credibility, its sentiment, media source and a whole host of other factors before applying it to the graph. The numbers along the right of the graph represent the reputation score. For example, between the 17th and 24th of July Quirk’s reputation jumped up, taking the reputation score from 1.5 on the 17th to 2.0 on the 24th (see image below). Jumps in your reputation like this should put a smile on anyone’s face, but there is more!

Knowing that your brand's reputation jumped up over this period of time is useful information but, once again, BrandsEye does not only track your reputation over time, but takes this information even further to give you even greater insight. You will notice that along the blue line that represents Quirk’s reputation score over time, there are little yellow dots. These dots are significant mentions that were published at that point in time. These mentions are the most significant indicators to explain rises and falls in your reputation. In this case, the cluster of yellow dots between the 17th and 24th of July let us know that there were a number of significant mentions around that time that caused Quirk’s reputation to improve. Once more these mentions obliviously heaped praise on Quirk which means a pat on the back for us. By moving you mouse over these yellow dots you will be able to see the titles of these significant mentions which are also listed below the graph like this;

Each significant mention is a link that, if clicked, will take you to the page or website where that mention occurred. This allows you to see exactly what people were saying that caused your reputation to jump. Imagine knowing instantly which of your products your consumers are happy or unhappy about. Information like this is invaluable as a PR and marketing measurement tool: You will now be able to see what kind of talk or actions cause people to talk more positively about you or your brand and focus your PR efforts on moving towards this.. I would like to hazard that if John McCain was using BrandsEye, he would have realised much sooner how much damage a certain vice presidential candidate was doing to his, and his party’s reputation.

Going back to the reputation graph, there is a lot more information it can still give us. When you are in the BrandsEye interface, you will notice that when you mouse over the spikes that illustrate mention volume you can click on each spike. This allows you to drill down into the report and get a list of all the mentions that happened on that day. For example on the 7th of August 2008 there was a huge jump in the number of mentions Quirk got online; this is represented by the largest spike on the Reputation graph. If we then click on the spike it takes us to a list of mentions for that day and looks something like this:

What you will see here is a link to every mention that was published on the 7th of August. This allows you to once again delve deeper into what people are saying about your brand online. This is useful in a number of ways. If, for example, there is a high volume of mentions on a particular day and at the same time your reputation score drops, you have the ability to get straight to the mentions online that caused the drop to happen. This makes the Reputation Report an invaluable crisis preemption and management tool, because it enables you to get to the source of complaints and respond appropriately, which ultimately is always going to reflect well on your brand. In a similar manner, one could use the Reputation report to find mentions that have caused your reputation score to improve. This will allow you to leave a message of thanks which will re-enforce the positive sentiment and turn casual brand commentators into ardent brand evangelists.

As you can see, there is a wealth of information that one can get from the Reputation Report, all of which is essential when you are managing and trying to grow a brand’s reputation. The success of PR and marketing campaigns can be gauged by honing in on a specific date range where the volume of mentions and how they affected your reputation score is displayed. Crisis can be avoided by watching the movement of the reputation score, and dangerous mentions about your brand can trigger a direct and relevant response. Ultimately, the Reputation Report will give you a true understanding of your brand’s reputation - something which could both grow your business and save it in times of crisis.

Part of getting on the road to success is knowing what you are doing right and wrong and then responding accordingly.

This was proved by Barack Obama, who in the beginning looked like he had little or no chance of wining the election. However, by knowing what people thought of him, he had the ability to respond accordingly and make history. With BrandsEye, anyone or any brand can now do the same. Even our own South African politicians are taking a leaf out of Barack Obama’s book and starting to pay more attention to their online reputations. 

The beauty of using a tool like BrandsEye to monitor itself means that there is a steady stream of honest, unsolicited client feedback – a dream for any product development team!

Over the last week Craig has been very busy updating BrandsEye and three useful functionality changes are now live on BrandsEye.com. These include the grouping of phrases within a category for easier management, a nifty little change to exclude certain categories and their sub-categories in a single action – and better phrase and mention volume analysis.

Clever Category Exclusion:

The first change is of a slightly more technical nature. BrandsEye currently allows for daily reports to be sent to various stakeholders in your company (whether this be the MD or the marketing director). These parties may not want to see the same things in their reports though, and with the latest change users can specify to follow certain phrases, but not see them in their specific reports.

Take for example Quirk eMarketing’s BrandsEye account (screenshot above). It tracks a wide range of brands, sub-brands, staff etc. Not all of these mentions are relevant to me, the marketing manager – such as SearchStatus which is managed directly by Craig Raw (the same genius who leads the BrandsEye team).

As such, it makes sense that I receive a daily notification for all mentions with the exception of Quirk SearchStatus mentions. This new functionality makes this much easier. To set this up for yourself click “Contacts”, find your name and click edit. Next click “Daily Notifications” and you will be presented with a page similar to the screenshot below.

Next add an additional criteria item and set it to “rated category” with “isn’t nor child of” and select the category which you want to exclude from your mention summaries.

This can also be applied to specific reporting or mention management with equal ease.

Phrase Grouping:

Over the past weeks we have received a great deal of feedback from users requesting that the process for grouping new mentions be improved. As a result BrandsEye now allows for phrases to be grouped together much more easily.

In the past users had to either manage all new mentions together or look at them phrase by phrase but with this new addition it's much simpler.

Just click the “phrase” drop down, select either a particular phrase or the entire group of phrases and hit show – it couldn’t be simpler!

Phrase and mention counts:

Another cunning update is the inclusion of information such as the number of phrases and mentions for each category. The intention is to make it easier to spot problems in your ORM campaign and make it even easier to pick up on trends:

There are many more updates on the way so if you are already using BrandsEye please send us your thoughts and we will do our best to implement them.

If you're not signed up yet – what are you waiting for? $1 A month is just about a gift so sign up and enjoy the security that BrandsEye can bring to you and your brand.

If you give Rob, Quirk’s CEO, the name of your company, your competitor or your fiancé, within minutes he will know just about everything that’s been said about them online. This is not because he swallowed a wireless router as a child (we don’t think), but rather an ability born out of his and Craig’s insatiable desire to make things work better.

Being aware of the speedy viral power a message can have online, Quirk started monitoring its clients’ online reputations in early 2006. As Rob explained to me during our interview, they used a range of the tools available at the time – Technorati and Google alerts among others. These systems allow you to track mentions of your brand, key employees and just about any term you care to search for online. Unfortunately these tracking engines always brought each mention in more than once.

In discussing BrandsEye’s origins Rob points out that “the initial idea was purely a system to tap into tracking engines and de-duplicate, but once we got that going we realised there was much more to it.”

Two years later, there is indeed much more. The current BrandsEye system “tags mentions with meaningful data” like its sentiment and the credibility of its context and author, to name just three. This data is then pulled into an algorithm that provides a reputation score (on a pretty graph) which can be tracked over time.

This algorithm was worked out based on research and testing. “We interviewed a lot of PR agencies and marketing people to try to get a sense of what was important to them out of all those variables.” The algorithm was then “buttoned down” with rigorous testing on live data – BrandsEye performed a survey of the top four banks in South Africa over four months. There have been many improvements to the system since then and Rob points out that the BrandsEye “evolves as we learn and things change”. For example, content released by the brand carried more credibility two years ago than it does today. Changes like this, while tough to measure, have to be taken into account.

Many of the changes to BrandsEye are confirmed by and sourced from online feedback. “We’re big fans of launching quickly and learning fast”, explained Rob, saying that it’s the users who can really tell you what’s valuable about a system.

It’s useful to see a brand in the same terms. While any company or individual may tailor brand messages, Rob believes that “the only thing that counts is how a brand is actually perceived”. This is why he sees BrandsEye being used by more PR agency’s in future. It provides a pretty great source of aggregated information about how people are discussing any brand. By “crowd sourcing opinions” BrandsEye can thus provide information that not only signals a reputation crisis, but rather signals opportunity.

It was in response to online feedback, for example, that the BrandsEye Blogger package was launched; “we got a lot of positive feedback, but many said the system was too expensive for the individual.” So while 1 dollar a month won’t earn BrandsEye much revenue, the team felt this kind of package would be worth it in terms of the word of mouth it could encourage.

In an online world, BrandsEye can arguably only be seen as useful. I had to ask, however, whether online reputation represents a company’s reputation holistically. Rob answered that “in the first world we’re very close to everything being online…what is said in a newspaper is very important, and as the world converts to digital we’ll eventually get to the point where your online reputation is your reputation.”
 

In order for you to manage your reputation you need to know what phrases to track in order to get an accurate idea of what is being said about you online. This comprehensive How To guide will teach you how to select and refine your search phrases on BrandsEye, or your ORM tool of choice, to do just that.

1). Focus on your objectives
Before you even begin to enter the phrases you wish to track, you must decide on what you need your ORM tool to tell you. A good plan is the basis of success and the easiest way to construct a good plan is to look at your existing business units (or areas of your personal life) and look at each unit’s particular marketing objectives. It’s then a matter of deciding how to use ORM as both as a proactive and reactive tool to maximise on and manage these marketing objectives.

By way of example, consider a bank which has strategically decided to focus on their “personal banking” business unit as phase 1 of ORM rollout. Typically a personal banking department is heavily influenced by consumer media. As such, their phrases would include those which look, in particular, at consumer sentiment therefore providing the key research for the marketing department to measure their PR successes, refocus their marketing efforts and highlight potential problem areas within the brand.

2). Use Boolean Logic to get the results you want

When setting up your search phrases there are three major Boolean identifiers which you should be aware of: the Quotation marks (“ ”), Plus sign (+) and Minus Sign (-). A clever combination of these three will mean that you customise your results and constantly improve upon the quality of results which you receive.

Quotation marks (“ ”) are used to acquire an exact match. For example, if you were interested in Quirk eMarketing then you would create the search phrase “Quirk eMarketing”, this means that the words Quirk and eMarketing must appear sequentially in the brand mention for them to be considered. This is in contrast to broadmatching which means that Quirk and eMarketing must appear in the same piece but not necessarily sequentially - which typically results in excessive amounts of irrelevant mentions.

The Plus sign (+) is used to string exact matches together. For example, should you want to get mentions about Quirk eMarketing which also talk about BrandsEye then you would create the phrase “Quirk eMarketing” + “BrandsEye”. This means that both exact matches must exist in the mention but that they need not be sequential - much the same as broadmatching.

The Minus sign (-) is used to remove certain words of phrases. For example, should you be interested in the online chat service FRING then your base search phrase would be “Fring” but this will bring in a great deal of irrelevant mentions about teenagers with fringes etc. To remove these mentions simply update your search phrase with a Minus sign. For example: “Fring” - “fringe”. This will search for all mentions of fring but will remove any mentions with have the word “fringe” in it.

The best combinations for phrases would be to include the brand name ‘+’ the phrase that you intend to track. This will not only give you the most relevant mentions for the search phrase but also make sure that you spend less time rating irrelevant mentions. For example: “BrandsEye” + “reputation”

Through Boolean Logic you can also make sure that the phrases exclude certain irrelevant mentions. BrandsEye makes this process much easier for the layman - you can refine these search phrases by entering the “advanced” phrase entry mode (available on the “edit mention” screen) - which helps you step-by-step with this process.

3). Test the phrases

Before adding the phrases there is a simple way to quickly reduce the volume of irrelevant mentions and therefore save you time. Simply add the phrase to your favourite search engine and browse the results.

For example, if you wanted to track Craig Raw (BrandsEye’s and Quirk CTO) then you would simple type “Craig Raw” into your search results. After hitting submit you see that there are other Craig Raws who have an online presence. It’s then a matter of excluding them. Simply look at their mentions and exclude the most distinguished item about them. In this case it’s “water” as there is another Craig Raw who owns a fishing farm in Colorado. We can be quiet certain that our Craig Raw will never be mentioned in conjunction with water so, simply update the phrase to “craig raw” - water and then type it back into your search engine.

Then, simply look at the results and if there are no immediate irrelevant mentions then move to the next few pages all the while scanning for irrelevant mentions. When found, simply exclude them and resubmit the search.

Once you are happy with the results you will add your phrase to your ORM tool and the result will be a nicely refined, high yield phrase - exactly what is necessary.

4). Start simple

A common problem in setting up ORM tools is that users bite off more than they can chew. As a rule of thumb we recommend that you prioritise the areas of your personality or business according to their impact on your business model or personal objectives. Start with the most important areas of your life or business and then decide on two or three highly focussed tracking phrases.

Phrases must be short and related to the brand that is being tracked, and it is advisable that you use a combination of the phrase and its brand in order to make sure that mentions received are less likely to be irrelevant. In addition, one must use combinations of phrases that people are most likely to use when writing about your brand - this may also include common misspellings.

Good starting examples include:

•   “Microsoft Internet Explorer 7”
•   “Table Mountain National Park”

The objective here is to use these niche phrases to get a sense of the phrases which people who are talking about you use. You can then use this to decide on more general phrases. Another benefit of this approach is that you won’t be inundated with too many mentions enabling you to learn how to walk before trying to run.

5). Refine your phrases regularly

This aspect is very important in making sure that your ORM tool continues to track relevant mentions. We recommend that users regularly review their phrases to reduce the irrelevant mentions which are brought in. The process of doing this is simple and quiet intuitive.

When sorting mentions, simply keep an eye out - within irrelevant mentions - for particular phrases which are consistently irrelevant. It’s then a matter of excluding them by using Boolean Logic. For example: if your search phrase was “Janine Carpenter” (BrandsEye’s Chief Operations Officer) you would find that this name is shared with a dermatological doctor in the United States. As such, we can exclude skin, doctor, Columbia, acne. The search phrase will then become: “Janine Carpenter” - skin - doctor - Columbia - acne.

Therefore, it vital to constantly review your search phrases and continue to add new phrases that become relevant for the brand to track, and remove or modify those that have become irrelevant. This also makes sure that you receive less daily mentions and that those you do get stay as relevant as possible.

6). Only track as much as you can handle

There no limit to the amount of phrases that you can track on a daily basis with products such as BrandsEye but there is a downside. These types of tools go can gather information from as far as 3 years back in the search for relevant mentions. As such, you could easily become inundated with mentions which hold little value to your brand’s current climate. As such, it is advisable to grow the volume of phrases until you are using all the time you have set aside to manage your account. Once this is the case refine your existing phrases and once the time spend drops then add additional phrases. Rinse and repeat - a sure fire way to make the most from your Online Reputation Management efforts.

So, now that you know how to refine the phrases you are tracking, there’ll be no stopping you. Remember we’re always here to give you advice and tips on how to better utilise BrandsEye in order to get the most from your ORM endeavours.

BrandsEye has been undergoing a rapid evolution since it's release, with user feedback showing us a lot of  changes to the system that can offer better usability and just generally have the system run smoother. I've been working on and implementing changes that, while small individually, we hope will collectively make your experience that much better.

Below is a list of the changes that have gone live most recently (warning: they might not make sense to those who haven't used the system before).

Changes to the Home Page

We've moved things around a little on the homepage, to give direct access to the new mentions that will be coming in for whatever phrases you've chosen to track.

• The “mark mentions” table has been placed first, which makes sorting that much easier.
• We've also added a new volume chart (shown below) for the non-Insight packages, that will show the number of mentions per day broken down into categories.
• Charts on the homepage will now prompt you to sort and rate if they have no data to display, instead of displaying a default message.

Confirmation of Deletes

• Deleting a category now provides a confirmation page listing what will be deleted before the delete takes place.
• This also includes the ability to automatically mark all mentions that are losing rating information irrelevant - this only applies to accounts with Insight.
• Phrases can now be deleted. This will cause all mentions picked up by that phrase to be deleted, and you will be presented with a list of them before confirming.
• A similar confirmation page has been applied to deleting contacts and rules.

Phrases

• A phrase can be made to have all its mentions marked relevant via a tickbox on its edit page. This creates or updates a system created rule, which can be viewed (a good way to see how rules work) but is not editable.

Accounts

• People who are listed as contacts can now edit their own passwords.

Bugs

• There are at least 3 other bug fixes, including the Apply Now function on the homepage.

As always we're eager for more feedback on these changes or any other suggestions you may have, so please let us know via the new Feedback page!